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Whataboutery

Pure fallacies are a rare breed. You encounter examples of such arguments in textbooks of logic, but
rarely in real life. Real-life fallacies generally bear some resemblance to valid
forms of reasoning, which makes them hard to distinguish.

Nevertheless, I
found a genuine, 24-carat nugget of bad reasoning the other day. The historian Jeroen Bouterse was reacting to
my essay “Disbelief in belief” on 3 Quarks Daily, in which I
suggested that modern secular Westerners have become so estranged from religion
that they have difficulty in putting themselves in the shoes of devout religious
fanatics. That fabulous garden in
paradise with 72 virgins, or the entire universe having been created in six
days: surely nobody actually believes that rubbish?

Writing on the web
site Geloof & Wetenschap (Belief and Science), Bouterse was completely in
agreement with me that “ideas matter”, and praised my call for people to
explore other people’s ways of thinking.
But he still had an objection:

I would like to ask Boudry, “When you tell us not to ignore
religious ways of thinking, what are you thinking of? Have you been struck by
the richness of St. Augustine’s philosophy? Do you think that the medieval
Islamic theologian Al-Ghazali touches on some interesting themes in the
philosophy of science?”

According to
Bouterse, the fact that I only wrote about fanaticism shows that I’m revealing
the true nature of my position. This is
a classic example of what is known as “whataboutery”. Instead of debating a point, you just switch
to a different subject: “But what about X?”
Of course, two can play at this game.
Why is Bouterse reacting like this to an essay by an obscure
philosopher? What about all the other
important and relevant subjects that he could have chosen to address instead?

It’s true that a
writer’s choice of subject can sometimes give away their position or show that
they have an agenda, but nobody can write about everything at once, in a single
piece. As soon as you stop writing, the
critic will bring up their own favourite topic: “your conspicuous silence about
climate change / whale hunting / crusades / tax evasion tells us all we need to
know”.

In this particular
case, I wanted to specifically focus on jihadism, as part of an academic
discussion over the question of whether religious people really believe what
they profess to believe, or whether they simply imagine that they believe it? One way to find out is to look at extreme
religious behaviours, such as a sick person who refuses medical help in the
hope of a miracle, or someone who blows himself up in order to enter heaven as
a martyr. It’s certainly a lot simpler
than ascertaining the exact mental states of medieval theologians.

Of course, that
leaves us with the question: out of all the errors in thinking that I could
have addressed in this column, why did I choose this one? Do I perhaps think that
ad hominem arguments are not so bad ?

Comments

Who do you call Bouterse? The only Bouterse I know is that white nose (human) reindeer from Suriname called Desi Bouterse. He is not a philosopher, he only understands the language of rifles & bullets.What is missing is atheist philosophy is the notion of sin. In Christianity sin is a central notion that is badly understood by most Christians, Roman Catholics in the first place but also by Protestants. Sin is the inclination of all human beings to do evil. They are really good at that, as the history of the 20th century abundantly illustrates. I have not seen or heard philosophers who are really shocked by that fact, who wonder what kind of creatures human being actual are. Not recognizing evil as a major force in society is the blind spot of all atheists and Christians alike.

No philosopher is shocked by your 'fact' is because it's utter nonsense given modern anthropology. No social species that has an outright inclination to do evil could survive past evolutionary pressures. Pointing at a century that has had incredible increase in moral standards compared to the previous ones has my confirmation bias-bell ringing.

@ Angelus Dobari: The 20th century has incredibly increased our moral standard? Compared to what? The moral standard of (say) the 17th century when the population of present Germany was decimated by the Thirty Years' War? In the 20th century we did improve our moral standards on paper but not in practice. Sin is an interesting concept though, because a lot of self pronounced world citizens are trapped in the house of guilt (some sort of Hotel California) out of which they cannot escape. The environmental movement is a nice example of that. They feel guilty about almost everything and they are accumulating their guilty every day by discharging CO2 in the atmosphere. They know that the Judgement Day is around the corner and they are trying to push that day forward by limiting their ecological footprint. At the same time they try to absolve all of humanity from that sin and to live ecological better lives. The analogy with Christianity is eye catching, don't you think so?

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